Environment & Sustainability

We are already experiencing the ill effects of greenhouse gases in the form of global warming, glaciers and polar ice melting, rise in the sea level and sudden, unpredictable variation in weather, turning catastrophic sometimes. The eventual effect of global warming is sending a chill down the spines of environmentalists. Several teams of researchers are working overnight on carbon capture technology. It intends to remove undesirable amount of carbon dioxide, the main culprit in global warming, from the atmosphere. No Comments

All three presidential nominees for the upcoming 2008 US elections are promising that they can end America's addition to oil through the research and development of green energy technologies. They claim that developing alternative energies will create jobs and turn the economy around, while helping to stop global warming and the national security issues caused by dependence on foreign oil imports. While their platforms sound appealing, politicians often say what we want to hear in order to get votes... so who do you trust is most likely to follow through on these promises? Are their claims even realistic? We gathered a few YouTube clips of each candidate speaking on the topic. Scroll down to cast your vote and leave your comments. 3 Comments

Google recently launched Earth Outreach as part of an effort to provide non-profit and public benefit organizations the knowledge and resources they need to reach hearts and minds in the ongoing struggle to raise awareness about global warming and climate change. Their environment and science showcase provides links to some of the more helpful and informative tools in the collection. You have to have Google Earth installed in order to view the files. 4 Comments

For the past several months the San Francisco Public Utility Commission (SFPUC) has begun picking up used cooking oil from restaurants and businesses for free in an effort to find fuel alternatives for its municipal fleet. The city hopes to expand the grease recycling program (called SFGreasecycle) to include small-scale household pickups and eventually power all city vehicles on biodiesel, including public buses and fire trucks. The oil is picked from local restaurants by SFPUC trucks, dropped off at a transfer station, filtered, transferred into a multi storage tank settling system, then decanted for three days. The oil is then sold to a biodiesel plant using bulk transport tractor-trailer pickups. 3 Comments

Bicycle sales have been booming in North America in recent years, with some sources saying high gas prices may be responsible for the trend. Bike shops are reporting high profits, bike lanes are expanding, and the web is exploding with useful blogs and websites designed to help cyclists. A few of our favorites are the Bike Forums, Bikely Routes, and the Bike Tutor. We'd like to see this trend continue as commuting by bicycle saves a lot of money, improves your health, and is probably one of the quickest and most effective ways to reduce carbon emissions! 2 Comments

The X-Prize Foundation, most commonly known for it's space exploration challenges, has launched a new generation of contests that they hope will have a global impact aned encourage a positive influence on global warming and progress toward clean, green, renewable energy. $100 million will be awarded to prize concepts that promote a world where energy is no longer a source of conflict and pollution, such that energy will someday be affordable and abundant, clean and renewable, and used efficiently and equitably. The project will start with a nine-month process to select the best prize targets. 1 Comment

Eugene Tsui has designed a concept city called The Ultima Tower that would help solve the global population crisis. Acting as a human termite nest, and costing $150 billion, these two mile high green towers would house over one million people in a one mile wide area. Instead of floors, the building's interior would consist of a multi-dimensional ecosystem complete with neighborhood districts and 30-50 meter high skies. Lakes, streams, rivers, hills and ravines comprise the soil landscape on which residential, office, commercial, retail and entertainment buildings can be built. 11 Comments

Scientists from the Vulcan Project at Purdue University have created an extraordinary piece of software that tracks the carbon emissions of the entire continental United States. This exciting virtual map has the potential of becoming an effective way to analyze and try to solve the climate change puzzle. The current data map only contains emissions from 2002, but more recent years are being analyzed and the project's ultimate goal is to "build a computer-based world in which all processes that emit fossil fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) at the planetary surface can be simulated, visualized, analyzed, and used by multiple stakeholders as they engage the climate change problem." 4 Comments

The word "nuclear energy" always inspires awe, and sometimes fear, because we always associate terms like "nukes" and "radiation" when we talk about something nuclear. But it is not as ominous as it sounds and in fact, for some countries it is a major source of energy. 75% of energy in France is generated by nuclear power and even in the United States, 19% of electricity is derived from nuclear energy. 15 Comments

The concern for our environment no longer remains in the realm of NGO activism and student projects. It is a real-time concern that stares us in the eye at every moment. Global warming, changing seasons, depleting forests, expanding deserts, melting glaciers and ice at the poles and increasing sea levels, food shortage, climatic aberration and suffocating pollution are glaring manifestations of an environment on the brink of turning into a global catastrophe. No Comments

With food-related riots erupting in many poor countries the debate surrounding biofuels have heated up again. How viable are they, considering numerous other options easily available to developed as well as developing and under-developed countries? 11 Comments

Ethanol producers are considering whether a dedicated pipeline might be the best method for transporting the fuel. The ethanol industry is currently reliant upon traditional transport methods, such as railway and tanker truck, to ship the fuel across the states. Since ethanol plants must depend on rail or truck for distribution, the result has been a delay in getting the fuel additive to the pumps. The industry has therefore initiated a study of the developing problem and a suggestion for an ethanol pipeline is emerging. 7 Comments

A recent US study released on November 13, 2007, warns that some alternative fuels can cause more harmful greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuel polluters like diesel or petrol. For example liquid coal, often touted as an alternative to gasoline and thus a way of reducing our dependence on foreign oil, can actual produce up to 80% more global warming pollution than typical unleaded gasoline. The process of turning coal into liquid (liquefaction by hydrogenation) actually produces nearly double the level of carbon dioxide emissions that conventional gasoline does, and it is considered by many environmentalists as a huge step backward for combating global warming. 4 Comments

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an organization dedicated to spreading free knowledge and inspiration by showcasing ideas from the world's most progressive thinkers. Their latest contributor, Environmental Scientist David Keith, encourages debate about Geoengineering as an emergency solution to the looming climate change problem. He believes it may be possible to avert disaster using planetary engineering, but also urges great caution about placing too much faith on science to save the world. While it is important to begin discussion about planetary engineering, we must also be wary that these ideas could result in increased public apathy towards the global warming issue. 4 Comments

It is time for our civilization to rethink the way we live, work, travel, design, build and consume. To think that we are doing our part simply by driving a hybrid car and recycling our paper, bottles, and cans is a dangerous illusion. For years, environmentalists have been telling us to do more with less in order to make change happen. This is simply not enough. We are going to have to fundamentally change the way we design our products, industries and cities. Our current recycling methods are inefficient and only serve to perpetuate the "cradle-to-grave" manufacturing model that we've been using for hundreds of years. 8 Comments

A New Zealand company has applied to patent Celsias.com, the world's first online community that allows regions, businesses or community groups to be paid for reducing the carbon emissions from their everyday energy use. Celsias.com is based upon a fast growing global economy that recognizes energy savings, or carbon credits, as a form of currency. "With Celsias.com you can now track, create and trade this new currency on the internet," explains Celsias director, Nick Gerritsen, "it's the first system in the world that allows you to do this all in one place." Celsias.com is expected to go live in early 2007. 3 Comments

The Million Campaign Homepage (MCH) is offering one million pixels to groups and organizations involved in furthering peace, liberty, democracy, environmental prosperity, education, health, bread and water, an open and border-less society, a co-operative commonwealth and the principle of 'less is more'. The campaign aims to employ the huge success of Alex Tew's Million Dollar Homepage in order to create an online ecosystem of campaign groups that co-exist together. Originally exclusive to the United Kingdom, the project has now expanded to include Canada and the United States. No Comments

BioPower Systems is developing a new ocean energy technology in Australia that will use bionics to mimic natural systems in order to produce energy. Both bioSTREAM and bioWAVE technologies use biomimicry, which refers to the adaptation of biological traits in engineered systems. BioPower Systems has copied many of the beneficial traits from natural systems in the development of the new ocean energy conversion systems. The company is researching this new technology for application. Laboratory testing will be completed in 2007, and full-scale ocean-based prototypes will be tested in 2008. Commercial units are expected to reach the market by the end of 2009. 1 Comment

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is sponsoring an exciting environmental design competition for undergraduate and graduate students. It's called the "P3 Award" (People, Prosperity and the Planet), and it fosters cutting-edge, sustainable solutions to environmental challenges. Through this national design competition, students and their faculty advisory submit cutting-edge, sustainable solutions to environmental challenges and compete for $10,000 to develop their designs. Winners from the first phase of the competition advance to the National Sustainable Design Expo in Washington, DC, in the spring of 2008 where they compete for the chance to win up to $75,000 in funding to move their designs to the marketplace or implement them in the field. No Comments

Growing urbanisation and changes in the pattern of life, give rise to generation of increasing quantities of wastes and it's now becoming another threat to our already degraded environment. However, in recent years, waste-to-energy technologies have been developed to produce clean energy through the combustion of municipal solid waste in specially designed power plants equipped with the most modern pollution control equipment to clean emissions. Yet, solid waste management practices differ for developed and developing nations. In developing countries like Pakistan, institutions charged with the responsibility to make decisions on solid waste management, operate in the enormous information, policy and strategy vacuum and lack therefore the ability to address this looming environmental disaster. 43 Comments